Elder Hafen speaks on gender identity and same-sex attraction

Individuals struggling with same-gender attraction should not let their challenges define their entire identity nor succumb to the increasing cultural confusion swirling around the topic of homosexuality.

That was Elder Bruce C. Hafen's message Saturday morning at the two-day annual conference for Evergreen International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping Mormons diminish same-sex attraction. The organization, which has no affiliation with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, held its conference at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building.

"You are not simply a child of God. You are a son or a daughter of God, with all the masculine or feminine connotations of those words," Elder Hafen, a member of LDS Church's Quorum of the Seventy, told conference attendees Saturday.

"That is your true, eternal identity," he said. "I urge you to seek a testimony, even a personal vision, of that identity. I ask you to take every possible step, each day, to align your physical and emotional life with the spiritual reality of who you really are."